4 Steps to Sharper Photos in Lightroom

Whether for personal or commercial use, showing off perfect photos is very important. You can create the perfection you want using different methods. The mostly used ones are Photoshop and lightroom which are both great at such use. Although you don’t have to have extensive knowledge about such tools to use them, you need to understand the function of each feature to use it well. You also need to understand your needs before applying any features. For example, you have to understand that clarity isn’t the same as sharpness. With lightroom, you can follow the steps below.

Step 1: Get the right perspective

This can be easily done using the lens correction feature available in lightroom. Depending on the lens you use and the portrait of your image, you can choose the most befitting adobe lightroom sleeklens lens correction tool to help you remove any distortions available in the picture. Under “lens correction” menu, click on “enable profile corrections” then choose the profile you want. You can also set it to auto and make further changes if it doesn’t give you what you want.

Step 2: Balancing

The idea with this step is to make the captured image as similar to the real image as possible. Go to the “white balance” feature that lightroom has and adjust it to make the image how you want it. For those who don’t change their white balance options before shooting, you can set it up as auto or as “as shot” depending on how it appears in lightroom.

However, if you change it before shooting, you may not have to adjust it to post capture. If the auto feature doesn’t make the image appear same as the original, you can adjust the white balance until you get the perfect result. You can also choose to remove all spots from your photo at this point. You can use the “visualize spots” feature to identify and remove any unwanted spots.

Step 3: Sharpen

Like the sharpening tools in Photoshop, those found in lightroom give you different options of changing your photo. With it you can choose the level of sharpening you want together with how to apply them.

The level of sharpness may vary according to the type of shoot and the portrait of the picture. For instance, some cameras lose sharpness when used at certain distances from the object and may therefore need higher level.

Step 4: Finishing

Sometimes you may need other details of the picture to be sharper than others. You can use several adjustment brushes to get that effect. A combination of negative and positive clarity on different parts of the picture can make other parts sharp and other less sharp.

When done, you can use the export module in lightroom to export those sharpening settings. You can choose the best option and level for you taking into account where you want the image displayed.

Conclusion

Sharpening images makes them more appealing and makes you look great as a photographer. However, you have to be careful to avoid overdoing it. For example, when choosing a sharpening level, you can use “standard” instead of “low” or “high”. Low level may not give you the desired effect while high level may “look overdone” especially when viewed on smaller screens. The standard level tends to be the best option for various devices.